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Looking for Structure in the Chaos of Chat Rooms

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Associated Press Writer

Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms -- flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks -- are terrorists plotting their next move?

The government certainly isn’t discounting the possibility. It is taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an antiterrorism program.

A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums.

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Chat rooms are the popular and freewheeling areas on the Internet where people discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, boys, politics, love, root canals. They are also where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms.

Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk -- virtually impossible.

Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, Rensselaer Prof. Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter. Downloading data from selected chat rooms, he will track the times messages were sent, creating a statistical profile of the traffic. If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they were speaking to one another amid the “noise” of the chat room.

“For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom,” Yener said. In search of “hidden communities,” he also wants to check messages for certain keywords that could reveal something about what’s being discussed in groups.

The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation’s Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in coordination with the nation’s intelligence agencies.

The foundation’s Leland Jameson said the proposal was judged on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the intelligence community to determine its national security value. Neither the CIA nor FBI would comment on the grant; a CIA spokeswoman cited the confidentiality of sources and methods.

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Security officials know Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups use the Internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But it’s not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and coordination.

Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chat rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used. Other cyber security experts doubted chat rooms’ usefulness to terrorists given other current options, from web mail to hiding messages on designated web pages that can only be seen by those who know where to look.

“In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture on a home page about tea cozies, I don’t know whether if you’re any better if you think chat would be any particular magnet,” said Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.

Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles.

But the idea of government review of public communications still raises concern.

Mark Rasch, former head of the Justice Department’s computer crimes unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the Pentagon’s much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness programproar over its impact on privacy.

“It’s the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem, even though no individual bit of data is particularly private,” he said.

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